crisis

The ABC Radio National program Rear Vision is a current affairs program that presents “contemporary events and people in their historical context”. I was recently interviewed by Rear Vision for a retrospective on the crisis, entitled “Here…

Households are in far worse shape now than in the 1930s, with a peak debt level that is two and a half times as high as it was in 1930. That’s why the crisis now is manifesting itself in stagnant consumer demand. It doesn’t involve the same…

Investors are anticipating the unravelling of the 21 July 2011 “solution” and a breakdown of the interbank-market that would throw the economy into an “immediate recession” like the one experienced after the Lehman bankruptcy. This column…

There are two spotlights in Europe today. France and Switzerland and their problems are intertwined. Despite denials by various French officials, the market suspects there is sufficient smoke to indicate a fire. Reuters reports that an…

The global crisis of 2008-09 hit emerging markets nearly as hard as it hit rich countries, which is welcome news compared to previous crises in which emerging markets often suffered much more than developed economies. This column explores…

This statement was issued to demonstrate coordinated global support in view of recent market turmoil.

This column addresses the high price paid by the President’s Council of Economic Advisors’ failure to read Akerlof & Romer

This post is a prelude to a BBC interview on the sovereign debt crisis. I am not going to answer financial Armageddon questions about "what oif it all goes pear-shaped" here because to understand where things are headed you need to know how…

I decided to look at what President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) were saying in their annual reports for 2005-2007 about the massive real estate bubble, epidemic of accounting control fraud and mortgage fraud, the resultant…

If economic crises make the short-run pains of reforms easier to bear, then crises could yield considerable long-run benefits. But this column argues that the recent global financial crisis has been wasted thus far. It suggests that it is…